Taking out the Trash

DateSeptember 4, 2018

With a plan for success mapped out, it’s time to dive into the next phase in our proven process: Design, Build & Validate. Our goal for this phase was to take the blue print and key concepts of data that we created during the Plan for Success phase and start building out a system that will be validated and tested by the end user.

To kick this off, our consultants met with key players in each department of PowerObjects to understand how their team leverages CRM. With insight from 11 different teams spanning from Sales and Marketing to Finance and Education, we built our own data dictionary that outlined the contents and structure of our existing database and the relationship between the entities and form fields.

During this exercise, each team went through every form in our CRM, describing how they used each field and nominating fields they thought could be removed. Internally, we referred to this process as “Taking out the Trash”.

The goal of this exercise was not to only remove fields that weren’t being used, but figure out how we can improve on what we already have, as well. —Justin O’ Connor, Lead Business Analyst (aka Workstream Wizard)

As a result, the team is projecting the following…

Getting rid of 40 fields and moving 50 fields on the Account form

Removing 75 fields from the Contact form

Pulling 32 fields from the Lead record

One of the major pain points when cleaning up the data in CRM is understanding how the fields are being used across departments and in the backend of the system. With over 250 active workflows in our production CRM, it is critical for us to identify what fields might be influenced – even if it’s hidden on a record form.

Stay tuned to see how our team tackles this challenge and many more as our migration story continues!

Happy D365’ing!

Prev Post

The Importance of Roadmapping

Next Post

Are you Considering Moving from On-premises to Online?

Related

Design, Build & Validate

Hear from the Stakeholders!

Design, Build & Validate

Why We’re Excited for Dynamics 365 for Marketing

Are you Considering Moving from On-premises to Online?

About Our D365 Migration Story

At PowerObjects, one of our guiding principles is to Live the Technology. That ideal has helped us become a leading Global Systems Integrator for Microsoft Business applications through the lens of Microsoft Dynamics 365. This has kept us busy at work helping customers achieve their Cloud vision. So, what’s next for us? Well, we set our sights on the skies, sort of, as we make our own move to the Cloud.

PowerObjects is migrating our existing on-premises Dynamics platform to Dynamics 365 Online. We’ve always said that we are our BEST case study for Dynamics success, and by taking advantage of the robust online features, marketing automation capabilities, and reporting functionality (just to name a few), our goal is to prove even further how passionate we are about Dynamics 365 as a business application.

Follow us on our migration journey in this interactive microsite. We’ll be providing updates, behind the scenes peaks into the progress, and insight into both the highs and sometimes lows of an implementation. We hope you enjoy our story!